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Pranayama III – Flying without wings

In Ashtanga Yoga classes, you are supposed to learn to breath in the very beginning. You learn a breathing technique. Is it really possible to LEARN to breath? Or is it something we could discover? Something to connect ourselves with?

I’m asking these questions, because I see people having practiced Ashtanga yoga for years and still struggling with their breathing (and thus themselves), still making huge efforts to make it through their practice. I also meet beginners who don’t struggle and who continue their yogic way in a flow.

Once you are familiar with this watching practice and you are connected to your prana, you can connect with the natural VOLUME of your breath. To become conscious of the volume of both the inhalation and the exhalation. If you feel that they are not in balance, delicately equalize them.

It’s not a question of having equal length in time or noice between in-breath and out-breath, but having an equality in volume and energy. You’d be exhausted with your practice every time you do it instead of revitalizing yourself if you’re thinking about time and stressing yourself out.

Of course, even if you start to do a more conscious work with your breath and you succeed in equalizing it, you may be exhausted, because you’re changing a pattern inside of you. This pattern has something to do with your psyche and so the work you do with your breathing, you do with your psyche too. Once you’ve managed to change the pattern, you don’t have to control your breath so much. It begins to adapt more easily to anything you do.

Volume doesn’t mean you have to take as much air in as you put air out, because the inhalation and the exhalation are really two polarities of one action. They complete each other in this action and they are very different in energy, as they are different physiologically and emotionally. Volume doesn’t mean either that you should take as much air as you can. You take what’s natural and what feels right and adequate in that particular moment.

Deep in the life level, inhalation is about opening yourself to receive prana. And this is a law of life: you can’t really take anything. You can just receive if you are open. if you don’t know how to receive, whatever you have, doesn’t really have value to you.

In the life level, exhalation is about keeping the prana inside you just got. Keeping and allowing your body to absorb it. This is possible when your mind and body are connected with your breathing and your prana. Otherwise, your body is living separately and is not getting nourished with prana. It gets what you give it in food and oxygen, but that’s not a real LIFE for your body.

The next step in your prana practice is to give more space to your inhalation in a relaxed way. Then you just watch how much this influences your exhalation. Make your inhalation a little bit longer so that you can feel it not only in your lungs, but in your body. It’s like an inside stretch of your body. So, give your body this smooth massage of your own breath.